It's All Fun And Games Until
by elenwyn
Summary: ...Someone Gets Stabbed With A Meat Knife. Pure crack!fic about the dysfunctional Petrelli family, bless their messed up hearts. Spoilers up to S3EP7 and the promo for EP8. One-shot.


**A.N: **This is pure crack, so don't take any of it seriously ;) Pairings include nearly every kind of Petrelli-cest imaginable, so if that doesn't float your boat, please don't read it. Like I said, it's not to be taken seriously!

**Warnings/Spoilers: **Rated for implications of sexual situations, mild drug abuse, incest, mild swearing, some violence and lots of alcohol. Spoilers up to **S3Ep7 and the promo for Episode 8.**

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything.

I started thinking up this piece on the Petrelli family after I saw a part of the promo for Episode 8, where Angela is running away from Arthur and then turns on him with a meat knife. You gotta love those dysfunctional Petrellis! :D Enjoy :)

--

As the Villain Formerly Known As Sylar watched the Christmas pandemonium unfold around him, he couldn't help but think that he was the only sane one in this family.

Sure, he'd had his problems but, as he'd told his psychiatrist – admittedly, the third one since Arthur decided he needed to sort out his 'anger' issues. He'd decided the other two weren't _special_ and, well, you know how it goes – it was all because his mother tried to drown him when he was a baby.

Ok, so she had a vision that he was going to turn into a mass murderer with an uncontrollable thirst for killing, but did that really constitute trying to bump him off?

Honestly, parents were so pushy these days. Judging by the way his brothers had turned out: one the (Flying) Senator for New York State and the other a hospice nurse/empath with a massive hero complex and the mentality of a five year old, Gabriel was glad he was the one to 'break the mould', so to speak.

After Arthur Petrelli's insane attempt at taking over the world, Angela had decided to force her offspring to spend Christmas at the mansion.

"We have problems," she'd told them sternly, though Gabriel was the only one listening. Nathan was too busy arguing with his lawyer and Peter was muttering something about explosions, one eye twitching horribly.

"Over the holiday, we're all going to get along and bond with each other. Like a nice, normal family." She beamed at her three boys, kissing them all on the cheek and stroking their faces in a rather strange and longing manner. Gabriel suppressed a shudder.

"Ma," Nathan asked, removing the phone from his ear for a fraction of a second, "Have you been on LSD again? This isn't Woodstock."

As Peter went into one of his trances, drawing on the mansion's brilliantly white, plaster walls with colouring crayons, the youngest Petrelli couldn't help but agree.

But still, it was only two weeks. How bad could it be, right?

---

Gabriel was wrong, so very, _very_ wrong.

It all started to go downhill upon the arrival of Nathan's illegitimate daughter, Claire.

As she entered the living room, the room went deathly silent, with Heidi Petrelli raising one eyebrow, Angela style, at her husband, who stopped talking on the phone long enough to look from the blonde girl to his wife, make a small, incomprehensible noise that sounded oddly like, "Scotch", and disappear into the den.

The blonde cheerleader then proceeded to whine about having fathers that let you down, a fact that Gabriel agreed with, but he was still tempted to shut her up ruining her hair-cut, so to speak. (If it was real, Gabe was _certain_ it was a wig.)

Thankfully, Peter came into the room at that precise moment, and Claire immediately shut up, focusing instead on the emo-haired boy that had flopped down onto the sofa. She sidled up next to him in an almost cat-like manner and Peter couldn't take his eyes off her.

"Careful, Claire," Angela mentioned from the other side of the room, where she was busy knitting, "That's your uncle, remember."

It seems they were either ignoring her or had temporarily gone deaf, because the cheerleader was now straddling the hospice nurse and kissing him with wild abandon.

Gabriel had to go out of the room. Peter had all the luck with girls.

---

The next debacle occurred when they were putting the tree up in the foyer of the house. Well, it wasn't really a _tree_, more like a 30ft monster made out of wood and pine but who was really checking?

They had squabbled over who was going to put the star on top of the tree, just like any other, normal family.

Except, well…

"I can fly!"

"So? I can fly too, _and_ I'm the one who always saves the day."

"He's _totally_ my hero."

"I'm the oldest!"

"I'm the youngest!"

"Correction," Gabriel cut in, looking bored, as both brothers looked up from where Nathan had Peter in a headlock, "_I'm_ the youngest."

"Oh, yeah!" They said in unison, before proceeding to carry on with the argument.

"I have more powers than you!"

"No fair! Dad, why didn't you inject me with as many powers as Peter?"

Arthur Petrelli shared a 'look' with Angela, who had been swearing at the maid in French, "Because your mother always favoured Peter over you."

"Yes!" Peter cried triumphantly as Angela fumed in the corner; the maid had ruined her favourite pair of socks!

Nathan let out a loud sob, walking morosely back to the den, "I need a scotch."

Peter followed his brother's retreating back, the empath inside of him feeling guilty for what had just happened. "I'll, er, go cheer him up." He raced off to join his brother.

Loud bangs and shouts followed, and Gabriel preferred to imagine his siblings were trying to kill each other. Besides, with Peter out of the room, Claire turned her focus onto him, smiling seductively and winding tinsel around his neck.

"I need help decorating my room," she said quietly, pulling him up the stairs by the tinsel collar and leash she had created.

Ok, so maybe _that _part wasn't so horrific. At least it wasn't his mother.

---

It was on Christmas Day that everything _really_ kicked off. At the dinner table, unsurprisingly.

Gabriel had started to think that perhaps this whole 'family bonding' thing wasn't such a bad thing, after all.

Really, nothing eventful had happened over the past two weeks, only the occasional power struggle between his parents, incestuous activity between, well, all of them, and the excessive amount of alcohol that led to Angela doing _that_ dance around the coffee table and admitting she'd slept with all the other founders of the Company, including Adam.

Nothing any other, normal family wouldn't do at Christmas time.

That was, until Peter read Gabriel's mind and found out about Clare and his' 'encounter' in her room the other week. The force of the news caused him to collapse into a coma, the blonde kneeling down beside his unconscious body with tears streaming down her face.

It was somewhere between the second course and Claire's flood of tears that everyone suddenly noticed the Petrelli patriarch was missing from the table.

"Shit," Nathan cursed, pulling out his phone to call the Company, before realising it wasn't much use as his mother _was_ the Company, and she was missing from the table too.

"What are they doing now?" Gabriel muttered, chewing on a piece of turkey. It was done just the way he liked it; crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. It reminded him of his first brain.

"The same thing I always do, my son," Angela appeared suddenly at the entrance to the dining room, darkness covering up most of her face in a most unusual way, her eyes gleaming, "Try to take over the world!"

She threw her head back to cackle menacingly, and crashes of lightening ensued. It was rather effective, Gabriel had to admit. And she wondered why he turned out to be a killer?

"No!" Came another voice from the other end of the room, "_I'm _taking over the world this time, Angela. The Company's had their turn."

"Oh, stop wining," Angela rolled her eyes at her husband, "First it was, 'Angie, I have a superpower that's worse than yours', then it was 'Angie, I want to kill you because you've foiled my evil schemes!' Get a grip."

The elder Petrelli's eyes locked on each other, both preparing their battle stance. Gabriel decided he'd skip dessert; the raisins in the Christmas pudding gave him stomach ache.

With a ninja-like cry that Hiro would have been proud of, Angela leapt towards her husband/enemy, producing a meat knife from a hidden pocket in her dress.

Unfortunately for Peter, who was lying comatose in the middle of the whole palaver, one parent running in from either side, he chose this precise moment to wake up, his hands glowing bright orange.

"I'm going to explode!" He yelled, jumping up and running out of the room, Claire following him. (Nathan had snuck off to the den for a 'small' drink about five minutes prior to the whole encounter).

Gabriel just rolled his eyes, reaching for the pitcher of water.

---

An hour later, Nathan was passed out drunk on the sofa, tinsel in his hair, - Gabriel half-wondered if Claire had gotten to him, too – Angela was being arrested on one count of domestic violence, three counts of arson and fifty-eight counts of theft, - one for each sock she'd stolen over the past two weeks without the family noticing - Arthur was taken to hospital due to stab wounds, and Claire and Peter were doing it like rabbits in a bedroom upstairs. Turns out the whole exploding thing was a false alarm.

Gabriel Grey-Petrelli, on the other hand, simply sat down in a chair and wondered how the hell he was going to fit this into his time slot with his psychiatrist on Monday.


End file.
